Perestroika, Glasnost, Art-Rock

As part of Hamburg's 1988 annual music festival--a staidly
Germanic, conservatory-trained affair now gussied up, like all the
continent's cultural assets, into a lure for other people's money--the
Soviet rock group AVIA performed a free open-air concert in a
downtown shopping district. Seven male musicians and seven female
appurtenances who dressed like Kraftwerk (or actually Devo) and
played like Pere Ubu (or actually nobody), they probably netted
fewer Deutschmarks than a band from the developed world would have,
but they were getting paid, and their disjoint art-rock antigroove
gave us somebody's money's worth. There was an accordion, a horn
section, a cowbell, a bald guy whopping his head on the beat, a
synthesizer-cum-Farfisa playing secondhand circus figures, or East
European march rhythms, or bastardized folk melodies. Doubting the
music would translate to record, however, I soon forgot about it--until
the catchiest circus figure surfaced memorably in Marjaana
Mykkanen's From Russia With Rock, just closed to politely
disappointed reviews at the Film Forum, and the bald guy provided
the climax to Artemy Troitsky's Tusovka, just published in the U.K.
by Omnibus and in the U.S. by nobody.

I know Troitsky, a Voice writer as of last week, but don't
blame me; Troitsky knows a lot of people and writes a lot of
places. One reason I went to see AVIA, in fact, was to get a head
start on the dialogue book he'd somehow persuaded me we could talk
into a tape recorder after a month on the Russian scene the
following spring. I admit I was relieved when my collaborator's
deal with his state publisher fell through--a Soviet tour seemed
less enticing as May got closer and Troitsky got further away. But
in the wake of Tusovka and From Russia With Rock--the film shot
three years ago, around when our project was conceived, the book
begun in mid-1989, around when it didn't go down--I'm not without
regrets. What a fascinating mess they've got over there. Sojourning
in the East Village a few weeks ago, Troitsky invited me to From
Russia With Rock, which exploits his critical expertise as a
consultant and commentator, and offered a brief analysis: the film
recounts the honeymoon of Russian rock under glasnost, the book the
marriage. Neither serves up the new punk or the new worldbeat.
Sorry. But taken together they say plenty about the lineaments of
bohemia, the politics of culture, and the failure of Zvuki Mu to
move up the charts.

Forget the music per se for a while--maybe forever, you'll
live. Soviet rock is crucial as a cultural phenomenon. Its
history--brought up to early Gorbachev in Troitsky's insider's
narrative Back in the USSR and Timothy W. Ryback's thorough if
breathless Rock Around the Bloc--is above all the history of a
bohemian underground. As such, it does strange things to the
sensible thesis of Jerrold Seigel's Bohemian Paris, which holds
that bohemia is the ordained obverse of bourgeois society, that the
two "imply, require, and attract each other." I'm idealist enough
to believe that the Soviet Union is not now and never has been
genuinely socialist. But if its new classes and sorry illusion of
general well-being ever rendered it bourgeois instead, that word
has no meaning. So amend Seigel to define bohemia as an inevitable
byproduct of any stable society that affords its citizens leisure
time--and also access, however stunted, to alternative information.
It's true that in Russia bohemians have to hold jobs. But that no
longer distinguishes them from East Village bohemians, except that
in the East Village you don't go to jail for parasitism, you go to
the park for not making the rent--or you go home to your folks,
where many Soviet bohemians live to begin with.

Rock Around the Bloc argues that bloc rock fans' "countless
acts of private rebellion, as unperceived as they were
uncontrollable, . . . gnawed relentlessly at the fabric of
socialist society" and rhapsodizes about "the realization of a
democratic process." From Russia With Rock plays up protest lyrics
and the struggle against bureaucratic repression. But these
processes aren't as grandly political as Ryback and Mykkanen make out.
Insofar as Russian kids' romance with rock and
roll was a romance with America (and from early Cliff Richard to
late Pink Floyd, it's had a distinctly Anglophile tinge), it was
a romance with consumer paradise rather than "freedom," just like
in any poor country. If anything, Russian rockers romanticize not
democracy but the '60s, and "the counterculture" rather than "the
Movement" at that. They're more literate and sardonic than their
Western counterparts. But their protests are typical boho
negations, their idealisms typical hippie (and/or Slavic)
romanticism. "We will never be the driving force in any political
movement simply because we deeply and sincerely dislike
politics," Troitsky claims in Tusovka. Later he notes that "the
whole anti-war idea is terribly inflated and uncool in the Soviet
Union" because Soviet leaders, those sly devils, have always
talked peace while practicing the opposite. Gee, Art, ever heard
of "pacified hamlets"? No, huh? Well, how about George Bush?

Those who credit Gorbachev with destroying genuine socialism
equate the overthrow of collectivism with the overthrow of
tyranny. For them, private rebellions are all the politics a good
market economy needs; for them, bohemians are the tip of the
bourgeois iceberg. But for those of us who conceive both
socialism (still the best name I know for a humane social
structure) and rock and roll as marriages of collective
consciousness and individual prerogative--radically unlike each
other, unconsummated for damn sure, and worth bringing together
nevertheless--Troitsky's political alienation, representative if
slightly overstated, is painful. It's hardly unprecedented,
however--the history of bohemia is full of rebels without a
cause, so why shouldn't they pop up here? And it's not
unmitigated either.

Even for the mostly dull bands who'd won professional status
by the late '70s, recording for Melodiya and touring from
Leningrad to Kabul, the rock life was a tightrope walk, and in
the space their hard-won privileges signified, a much chancier
dissident musicians' subculture took root--a subculture of
phantom jobs and magnetizdat tapes, legal youth clubs and private
parties, brushes with the law that got serious with every
freeze (especially under reputed jazz fan Andropov). Grabbing at the
information age's tail, perestroika's handlers hoped to transform such
threatening cultural expressions into profitable cultural
commodities--perhaps even lures for hard currency. Bureaucratic
double-crosses notwithstanding, rock was a national phenomenon
that made the Rockpanorama festival Mykkänen filmed inevitable,
and though satirical painters proved fatter cash cows, the music
got its share of novelty ink in the West. So of course musicians
ran around like they'd just dreamt tomorrow's lottery number.
Working regular TV and radio gigs, the once-banned Troitsky is
doing as well in the economic wreck of perestroika as any
noncriminal can ("We can always eat CDs," sighs his wife Svetlana
Kunitsina, a fashion journalist in a country where there's still
no fashion). More levelly than most propagandists looking down
cultural imperialism's throat, he weighs the danger of cooptation
against the danger of isolation. But he watches warily for
sellouts, fuckups, and other symptoms of panic. And he finds that
in the culturally well-endowed but materially underdeveloped
Soviet Union, traditional artistic rebels are proving more
steadfast than rock's pop-craving, starry-eyed hippies manque.

Save one costume designer, the 10 standard-bearers profiled
in Tusovka are all musicians. But only two--rich, ruined Boris
Grebenshikov and Zhanna Aguzarova of Bravo, who's highlighted in
From Russia With Rock and has one of the few decent tracks on
MCA's Melodiya-licensed Glasnost compilation--are committed rock
stars. Instead Troitsky honors a songpoet who committed suicide,
an old boho with a career as a character actor, a Lithuanian
architect turned Lithuanian rock hero turned Lithuanian politico
turned Lithuanian rock hero, a Russian punk worthy of the name,
and no fewer than three unabashed avant-gardists: painter Sven
Gundlach, whose band name translates as both Central Russian
Heights and Average Russian Loftiness; keyboardist Sergey
Kuriokhin, whose aleatory ensemble Popular Mechanics reads like
John Zorn; and mime turned singer turned postmime Anton
Adasinsky, who shortly after I watched him whop his bald head in
Hamburg left AVIA with his specially trained female dancers to
form the bald performance-art troupe Derevo.

Despite complaints that the bands weren't hip or authentic
enough--and of course the rockabilly was silly, of course the
metal was metal--I found myself enjoying not just AVIA but
Televisor and Brigada S in From Russia With Rock. But the film
certainly overplays the groups that come its way, especially art-rockers
Nautilus Pompilius, who made a splash at Rockpanorama but
soon retreated confusedly to their base in Sverdlovsk. It's
unrealistic to expect foreign-language nondance music that
emphasizes lyrics and comes to guitars secondhand to command much
hard currency, especially from America's arrogantly Anglophone
market. Like Gorbachev, whom he appreciates now that the road to
perestroika is all hairpin turns and falling rock zones, Troitsky
identifies more with Europe (the secret of Russian Anglophilia,
I'll warrant). So he's signed a label deal with Brussels-based
Crammed Discs for three bands. Calling them rock bands would be
pushing it--all from Soviet Asia, including Siberian Tuvas whose
vocal double-clutching makes your favorite Bulgarian chorus sound
like high-school music teachers, they'll market as neatly as
"world music" ever markets.

Troitsky hopes the Voice will cover a festival he books in
Kazakhastan next summer. But he puts his personal hopes in Anton
Adasinsky's Derevo, site-specific improvisors who focus on
factory performance and see their mission as combatting acute
alienation, a state of mind that's hardly unique to bohemians in
Russia--that over the past two decades, in fact, has turned into
a life-threatening national disease. Troitsky feared three months
in the West in 1989 would blow their collective mind, "another
bright light extinguished by the careless but insatiable
capitalist monster." Instead the tour left Adasinsky convinced
that "only at home can we create our most powerful stuff," that
the struggle against an "inhuman, inflexible way of life" must
never be abandoned. And if he succumbs to his own marketability,
you get the feeling Troitsky will locate other permanent
marginals bent on insisting that the Soviet Union succeed
bourgeois society rather than recapitulating it. Impossible
demands have always been a bohemian specialty.